In Pieces: Exploring How Family and Social Order Shape Identity
10 October, 2026 — Waiheke Island, New Zealand
People Like You examines how identity is formed, rejected, remade and ultimately reconsidered across a lifetime. Through interconnected narratives spanning childhood, adulthood, motherhood and old age, this autofiction considers the lasting influence of personal and social order, migration, shame and guilt on the way individuals understand themselves.
At the centre of the narrative is a persistent tension – the push to leave the past and the stubborn discovering that it keeps its contradictions intact. Characters change countries, relationships, careers and social environments, confronting inherited expectations, only to find that the question of who belongs, “people like us” or “people like them” follows them around. Social mobility brings opportunity, but it also asks after guilt, authenticity, and whether changing circumstances can truly erase an earlier sense of self.
Memory gathers force as the years advance and the narrative progresses. Later life brings former selves into conversation, while notebooks, photographs, dreams and relationships reveal personal history as continually interpreted, never permanently settled. People Like You ultimately considers belonging not as conformity to a group, but as the difficult process of holding the many parts of a life together.
KEY FEATURES:
• Explores social order, social mobility and the psychological experience of moving between social worlds.
• Examines migration, displacement and the complicated relationship between departure and belonging.
• Traces shame, guilt, family expectations and inherited patterns across different stages of life.
• Addresses motherhood, ageing, relationships and changing perceptions of identity over time.
• Uses memory, notebooks, dreams and recurring experiences to connect apparently fragmented lives across generations.
By bringing these concerns together, People Like You speaks to contemporary conversations about identity, social belonging, inherited experience and the stories people construct around where they come from.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
I was born in 1976, in former Czechoslovakia. Discontented with my world shaping in Orwell’s 1984 vision, I left in 1995, eventually settling in London. I learned English as an au-pair and later completed my legal qualifications while a trainee in a city law firm. My academic journey continued with Masters with Merit in Classical History and later, in Social Sciences. I am a Member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. I am a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. I am professionally active in London, UK and in New Zealand.
Book Name: People Like You
Author Name: Monika Killeen
ISBN Number: 979-8951966087
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